Is all News Now Opinion? - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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#15091606
Over the last ten years or so I have noticed that news no longer reports facts. It used to be the case that a biased news source would not be considered as such because its journalists and anchors openly expressed such opinions but because of its biased coverage. It would only feature certain opinions, but they would still be opinions of citizens, or pieces of information that could lead people to think in a particular way.

Today news media is openly biased. Journalists will openly state their opinions and give their commentary on global affairs. New programmes often have talking heads presenting very strong opinions which you would not expect of impartial media.

What happened to news media and why does it no longer attempt to hide its bias?
#15091608
The desire for purely factual and objective news would require it to be so dry and narrow in scope as to be useless. That wouldn't be news, it would be simply presenting data without interpretation.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/works/concepts-genesis.htm
What makes Quality, Quantity and Measure stages of Being is that they remain forms of concept which are not self-conscious, that is, they are completely objective, describing the object in observer terms, and terms which lack a concept of the phenomenon as such. This is the standpoint of natural science, mathematics and contemporary, positivist social science. In contemporary mainstream social science, one doesn’t have, for example, political movements or even political opinions. You just have so many votes for such and such a party, so many days of lost production due to industrial action, so many positive and negative responses on a survey form and so forth, and any amount of statistics and correlations.

Advocates of this kind of science insist on the necessity of basing science in observation, measurement and, in short, facts not opinions. And so long as we don’t elevate this principle to an absolute, it can’t be denied that it is a necessary, even unavoidable stage in the development of a science. Before you can determine whether hygiene is a cause of susceptibility to allergies, you have to gather a lot of data, and hypotheses about the causes don’t count for much in such a complex problem until you have a great deal of well-organised data on which to base any idea.




It isn't a high stage of knowledge/knowing but the beginning.
The very idea of truth and partisanship in propaganda is a bit complex because truth isn't God's eye but necessarily a particular but universal standpoint although it's not as if the news' function is to do much more than entertainment to get paid advertisements, even the news itself often directly advertises things, even if it is ideas and not always products.

Although I admit I have a bias for what I experience as non-sensationalist news that isn't so crudely as such and does seem to do a slightly better job in investigating serious subjects.
#15091609
You are conflating science and politics.

Politics should be informed by science, but you know how that goes. Rachel Maddow has experts on all the time, and they get to speak their mind.

Faux News is guilty of screwing over science constantly.

Maddow was the person that brought the poisoned water in Flint, Michigan to the attention of the country. Still hasn't been fixed, btw. Think we're going to need a Democrat before we stop that...

About the video, Hamilton and Jefferson both started papers, and they were there primarily to slag the other guy.

Which brings me to my point. There is a place for advocacy.

Good video, could stand a little editing, but manages to cover the basics.
#15091611
late wrote:You are conflating science and politics.

I know the distinction but I wish to quash the idea of a purely factual news/media. It simply doesn’t exist and if it did it’d be boring.
The truth of things necessarily entails the relationship of humans to things and one another. But there is a tendency to dismiss human subjectivity as purely biasing understanding rather than crucial to the very possibility of truth. Natural science is ideological in its presentation of its facts as independent of human beings for the sake of legitimacy which doesn’t render the discoveries subjective but that the presentation of science doesn’t actually explain its own process as it’d always end in an epistemological dispute.

And in regards to news the point is that even partisanship isn’t the essential problem with news. Rather the attempt to stand above opposing positions seems to me the more abhorrent position.
Although there is much wrong with media I don’t think it’s necessarily partisianship, I have disdain for that which attempts to strictly straddle two positions in an eclectic manner although there is crudeness in many who propose one sidedness of an issue rather than properly illuminating the nature of a problem. But that again is that the news doesn’t reflect deep interest in an issue and its possible solutions. Hence one controversy is readily forgotten for the next news cycle.
#15091612
Just ignore MSM and find alternative sources. I consider the MSM news as a reality show because it fell so low in recent years that it can be considered as an equally trashy and fake as any modern reality show
all of those "experts"on the news channels are paid to promote the channels agenda they wont hire any "expert" who wont be ready to cooperate with them
#15091692
No, all news is not opinion.

Avoid pundits if you want to stick to news, and recognize when anchors are voicing opinions, and not facts.
#15091712
Political Interest wrote:Today news media is openly biased. Journalists will openly state their opinions and give their commentary on global affairs. New programmes often have talking heads presenting very strong opinions which you would not expect of impartial media.

What happened to news media and why does it no longer attempt to hide its bias?


You say it like it's a negative thing. Bias is inevitable. Any given group of people will have a collective bias that clouds their vision of the truth. The people in charge of news corporations generally have a specific political agenda which it is in their interest to advance. If even a randomly selected group of people will have certain points of overall agreement that lead to a collective bias, surely this is much more the case with a group specifically selected for certain ends.

In the past, there was a certain expectation of a degree of impartiality on the part of news corporations. The increasing social, cultural and economic divisions in Western societies, which inevitably degrade social cohesion over time, have slowly erased the expectation for some semblance of impartiality. Now, the loss of social cohesion is not good, I'll grant you, but I think the more open bias is actually a positive side effect of it. There was never true impartiality, as bias is inevitable. A more openly biased media means that you can more effectively decode any given corporation's agenda and move on to figuring out motives for this. You can always compare and contrast news coverage across different outlets to find something close to the truth. At least now, you know what you're getting, and the lies aren't subtle enough that you don't notice.
#15091889
News is opinion because it is about ratings and whoever owns the news company can frame the news however they want...broadcasting is about control.

ABC news claims to be the #1 source for news in the country. They are proud of the stories they choose to cover. If they did not keep ratings up, the network could pull the plug. It seems like it is the same way it is with TV shows and episode ratings.

I remember in Bowling for Columbine, Michael Moore discussed how the media uses fear to control people, to control what they believe. He is still right. Viewers are heavily influenced by what they see on TV and on websites. Fear is a powerful tool to get people to listen to your message. Like if you embed a political message in a horror movie, viewers will eat it up. Most people are easily impressed especially if the message is dramatic or sensational. The public loves drama.
#15091892
I moss investigative journalism where the journos would create the news when they broke open a huge story in politics or a company. Where it served the interests of the average person because it was about corruption and nefarious thing that screw em over.
#15091904
Wellsy wrote:I moss investigative journalism where the journos would create the news when they broke open a huge story in politics or a company. Where it served the interests of the average person because it was about corruption and nefarious thing that screw em over.


Me too. I once wrote a report about Nellie Bly. She would go undercover to write her investigative reports. She was inspiring.

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